Customer Satisfaction, who really cares?

 
 

United or Divided?

Customer satisfaction should be a top priority and constantly in the mind of business owners who are doing whatever feasible to make the customer happy and keeps them coming back to buy more. Well, this isn’t true for all money-making businesses.

One thing for sure, monopoly organizations and airlines are the least to worry about and spend little resources on improving customer satisfaction. Why do they need to? Their customers keep coming back and are always in the queue to buy their products or services.

This airline was in the news in recent weeks after a video showed security officers dragging a bloodied passenger off an overbooked flight in Chicago to make space for a member of staff. The result was backlash on social media, billions of dollars wiped off their market share and a seriously tarnished reputation, for now.

Following the news and a few quick checks uncovered the fact that this airline is a very good company to work for. Why? It’s corporate policy is to put Employee First, not Customer First. Even in their corporate ‘shared purpose’ statement, ‘employees’ come before ‘customers’. So do they really monitor and measure customer satisfaction? I guess probably not. This is the least to worry about on this CEO’s mind. Their pre-tax profit was 3.8bn in 2016 and consumers are buying their services even if they are not happy.

Although most airlines declare they are ‘customer focused’ and monitor customer satisfaction and service quality standards via ground surveys and focus-group discussions, I have neither participated nor seen one being conducted. Perhaps arriving passengers are in a hurry to answer questionnaires but surely, they have lots of time to kill when they are in the air. Nobody is doing it.

Customer satisfaction is one element in the new ISO 9001:2015 Standards and organizations must determine the methods for obtaining, monitoring and reviewing customers’ perceptions of the degree to which their needs and expectations have been fulfilled. Unfortunately, the airline industry does not subscribe to this standard.

So what service quality everyone is talking about these days?

Either you take it or leave it. Someone is always queuing behind you to take up their offer.